“Yes, that’s me, it’s my bedroom,” she said. “I never sleep like that.” She was struck by how floppy her cheek was. She told Perret, “I don’t know where I am anymore.”
He showed her another photo, of a man in her bedroom with graying hair and a tattoo. “Do you recognize this location?” he asked.
“Who is this guy?” she said. “I never wanted to have sex with him.”
When he mentioned a Skype username that her husband had used to communicate with her rapists, she said, “You’re speaking Chinese to me.”
Perret asked if she wanted to press charges. Her husband, he explained, had kept a list of more than fifty people in the past decade who’d raped her while she was unconscious. The thought of pressing charges hadn’t occurred to Gisèle, but she said yes.
An officer drove Gisèle home while Dominique stayed at the police station. “I got caught up in a vicious cycle,” he confessed. “I realized that, with sleeping pills, it was very easy to get what I wanted, which I couldn’t get otherwise, which was normal, because it wasn’t her way of life.” He said that he had ruined his family. He was disgusted with himself. “I had fantasies that gradually came true, and I wanted to take them further,” he said.
When Gisèle got home, she put a load of laundry into the washing machine. Then she asked her closest friend in Mazan to come over. As she waited, she hung Dominique’s boxers and pajamas on a clothesline in her garden. It was good that the sun was out, she thought—his clothes would dry quickly. She did some ironing and vacuumed the bedrooms.
The next morning, her three children—David, Caroline, and Florian—came from Paris to the police station to meet with Perret, who filled them in on his investigation. As Gisèle drove with them back to Mazan, she felt relieved that there was leftover pumpkin soup in the refrigerator that she could serve for dinner. But her children were not interested in sitting down for a meal. Caroline, who was forty-one and a communications manager, said that the house suddenly looked uglier and older, and she no longer liked the smell. She and her brothers started going through her father’s drawers, where they discovered unpaid bills. A few hours later, Perret called Caroline and asked her to return to the station. He realized that he’d recognized her face. At the station, an officer showed her two photographs of her asleep in bed. In both pictures, she was lying on her side, her underwear exposed. “It should be noted that Mme. Caroline Pelicot is shaking and informs us that she feels very ill,” the officer wrote. “Let us suspend the meeting.”
When Caroline returned to the house, she later wrote, her mother looked up at her “casually, as if I’d just come back from a pleasant walk.” David, the oldest child, who works in marketing, had always credited his father with giving him “a good education, values, a backbone.” He told me, “I decided very quickly to erase this man from my memory.” He and Florian put Dominique’s belongings in trash bags, and drove to the dump. They made ten trips. Caroline destroyed framed photographs and art on the walls, as well as a trunk of family photo albums. “I think my mother resented me for that—for being in that kind of frenzy,” Caroline said later. Gisèle remembers telling Caroline, “Don’t break everything, please. There are things I’d like to keep.” Of all her children, Caroline was the one that Gisèle struggled with the most. “She’s one of those highly strung people who love and lose their temper in the same breath,” Gisèle writes in her new memoir, “A Hymn to Life.” “She seems to have been filled since childhood with a feeling of insecurity that I have never really understood or been able to soothe.”
As a child, Caroline considered her father “more motherly than my mother,” she said. She described him as a “dad who listened, who came to see me in my room, who sat on the edge of my bed and said, ‘But, Caroline, you can’t say that—you can’t behave like that.’ ” He helped all three of his children with their homework, played soccer with them, and cooked for the family. After Caroline had her own child, she and her husband, Pierre, spent a few weeks every summer with her parents. In the evenings, they drank cocktails and played Trivial Pursuit and sometimes stayed up until 1 A.M. talking. “I adored this man,” Pierre said later. Florian’s wife, Aurore, was similarly struck by the family’s rapport. “I remember telling my husband that they were U.F.O.s,” she said. “I, who came from a complicated family with taboos, arrived in a loving, demonstrative family. For me, it was a bit like the ideal family.”
